Abstract
Animal sociality, an individual’s propensity to association with others, has consequences for fitness, and particularly mate choice. For example, directly, by increasing the pool of prospective partners, and indirectly through increased survival. Individuals benefit from both over the short-term as these benefits are associated with mating status and subsequent fecundity, but whether animal sociality also translates into fitness is unknown. Here, we quantified social associations and their link with annual and lifetime fitness, measured as the number of recruits and in de-lifed fitness. We measured this in birds visiting a feeding station over two non-breeding periods, using social network analysis and a multi-generational genetic pedigree. We find high individual repeatability in sociality. We found that individuals with an average sociality had the highest fitness, and that birds with more opposite-sex associates had higher fitness, but this did not translate to improved lifetime fitness. For lifetime fitness, we found evidence for stabilizing selection on between sex sociality measures, suggesting that such benefits are only short-lived in a wild population.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
